This course will introduce students to different ways in which anthropologists (and others) have sought to understand the human mind in its social and cultural context. It will survey a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives within psychological anthropology and cognate disciplines, including psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic social theory; phenomenological approaches in anthropology; and other anthropological engagements with the psy disciplines.

Students will learn to assess the value and limits of various perspectives on the human mind by placing them in dialogue with ethnographic studies of selected mental phenomena and mediating social practices. These ethnographies will be about the outer limits of mental experience such as the uncanny, hallucinations and dreams and how these relate to time. What does it mean to be human and to exist suspended between the past, present and future? And how do limit experiences alter our mental experiences of time and reality? How is our sense of mental reality generated and who gets to define what it is?

Specific topics addressed include:

• Human Consciousness in Time
• The Uncanny and ‘Reality’
• Trauma and Temporality
• The Will and the Unconscious
• Scientific Experiments and other Hallucinations
• Neuroscience and Mystic Materialism
• Imagination and Dreaming
• The Gaze, Visions and Creativity